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Kitchener's Store Sauce, Superlative
(For Fish, Poultry, Game, etc.) Take a pint of claret or port, a pint of mushroom ketchup, half a pint of walnut or lemon pickle, four ounces of pounded anchovies, an ounce of fresh lemon-peel, pared very thinly, an ounce of scraped horse-radish, an ounce of finely minced shallots, half an ounce of powdered black pepper, half an ounce of allspice, a salt-spoonful of cayenne--or a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder--and a small tea-spoonful of bruised celery-seed. Put these into a wide-mouthed bottle, and let them remain for a fort-night, shaking them every day. At the end of that time strain, and put into small bottles for use. Probable cost, 2s., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient, a table-spoonful for a quarter of a pint of melted butter or gravy.
A cold-macerated store sauce in the Worcestershire mould: nothing is cooked, so success depends on the salt, acid and alcohol in the base doing the preserving. Read the ingredient list as a set of liquors rather than solids.
- What the pickles mean"Half a pint of walnut or lemon pickle" means the pickling liquor, not the fruit — decant the dark vinegar from a jar of pickled walnuts, or the salty spiced liquid from a lemon pickle. Preserved lemons in brine, liquid included, are the nearest thing on a modern shelf.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup. This is the thin, near-black liquor drawn from salted mushrooms, still sold by a few British firms; a pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml) in the imperial measure this book uses. Soy sauce thinned with mushroom cooking liquor is one common substitution, though it shifts the flavour.
- Pounded anchoviesFour ounces (115 g) of salt-cured anchovies mashed to a paste — the whole salted fish of the period, not oil-packed fillets. If using anchovies in oil, drain them well; anchovy paste will also serve, though its salt content varies by brand and the flavour is flatter.
- Small-spoon measuresA salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, a dessert-spoon about two teaspoons. The imperial pint here is 20 fl oz, so the liquids alone come to 2½ pints (about 1.4 litres) before the anchovies and spices are added.
- The fortnightKeep the bottle in a cool dark place and shake it daily as instructed — the horseradish, shallot and celery seed give up their flavour slowly and the daily agitation keeps the ground spices in contact with the liquid rather than caked at the bottom. Refrigeration is the safer option, though the cold will slow extraction.
- StrainingStrain through a double layer of muslin rather than a sieve. Fine spice sediment left behind will make the bottled sauce cloudy and gritty on the plate.
- Keeping and usingBottle tightly, keep refrigerated, and treat it as a seasoning with a shelf life of months rather than years. The stated dose — a tablespoon to a quarter pint of melted butter or gravy — is a good starting point; it is very salty, so season the finished sauce only after adding it.
- The cayenne or the curry powderThe alternative is not decorative: cayenne keeps the sauce sharp and fish-friendly, while a dessert-spoon of curry powder pushes it towards a turmeric-and-coriander flavour of the kind often met with in poultry and made-up dishes of the period. Choose one before bottling, not after.
The name points to Dr William Kitchiner, whose Cook's Oracle (first published 1817) was much reprinted and much pirated, and whose store sauces — this one, his "Wow-Wow" sauce, his mushroom ketchups — went on appearing under his name in later compilations, decades after his death in 1827. Store sauces of this kind were the domestic answer to a problem the period took seriously: a household wanted a bottle on the shelf that could turn plain melted butter or a thin gravy into something with depth, without recourse to a long-simmered stock. The general idea — salted or fermented fish, vinegar or wine, spice, a period of maceration, then strain and bottle — is the same one Lea & Perrins commercialised from the later 1830s, and the ancestry of such anchovy, shallot and spice liquors is generally traced back to the fish sauces English cooks had been making since the seventeenth century. The costing, two shillings excluding the wine, tells us the compiler treated the wine as a variable the reader would price for herself.